| English-Chinese comparative study has had a rapid development in recent years and research results are also very rich. There are few achievements made in doing contrastive and systematic research on Chinese and English mood system. At home the contrastive research on mood system between Chinese and English is usually concentrated on a certain aspect, however, how the features and modal meaning of the whole Chinese mood system are presented in translation is what should be concerned in language contrastive studies. With the rising of Chinese Confucian studies, the translation of Ancient Chinese moods gradually attracts scholars’attention. Nevertheless, due to various reasons, research in this area is still not paid enough attention to. Therefore, this thesis will compare Chinese mood system and English mood system from the perspective of contrastive linguistics and try to find differences and similarities between them. There are such similarities between Chinese and English mood system as:firstly, mood has close relation with modality in both Chinese and English; secondly, they both use various devices to express mood and their devices have a high degree of overlap; thirdly, they are of a hierarchy and various moods can co-occur in one sentence; finally, they apply metaphor to realize the shift of the same pragmatic meaning from one sort of mood to another. Because these two languages belong to different types intrinsically, they employ their own characteristics:in terms of categories of the function mood, exclamatory mood is peculiar to Chinese and subjunctive mood to English; in terms of mood devices, analytic Chinese centers around modal particles and synthetic-analytic English centers around verbs. On the basis of this contrast and the predecessors’ research findings, we explore the mood, modal particles and modal meaning of modal particles in a deductive way. Meanwhile, how to deal with Ancient Chinese modal particles when translating Ancient Chinese classics into English, will be discussed with The Analects as language material which is the representative works of Chinese Confucian culture. This thesis is designed to find the best translation strategies of Chinese mood, providing certain strategies reference for translating Ancient Chinese classics into English.This thesis contains five chapters. The first chapter is introduction in which the definition, classification and expression devices of mood in the East and the West are firstly analyzed. Then the author defines them and the essential modal meaning of modal particles that this thesis studies, establishing the starting point of this research and limiting the scope of contrast and research methods. The second chapter is literature review separated into two parts. The first part concerns the research on contrast between Chinese and English mood system; the second part is the study of translation between Chinese and English mood. On the basis of the contrast, the predecessors’ achievements and deficiencies in mood study are concluded. In Chapter three, using the English version of The Analects as reference, the author makes macro comparison between Chinese and English mood system in terms of similarities and differences. In chapter four, the author suggests translating Chinese mood expression devices through domestication. These devices include those shared by Chinese and English and still the one peculiar to Chinese, that is, Chinese modal particles. Some specific methods and strategies are used to deal with Chinese modal particles:using English intonation and parts of speech in English; using relevant English tenses and word order; using some related English syntactic structures and omission and so on. Meanwhile, the same strategies are used to transform Chinese mood. When translating Chinese mood, we take equivalence as the main way and the mood transformation secondary. The mood division, combination and omission are scarce. The fifth chapter is the conclusion of this thesis. |
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